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Ed Webb

Imperialist feminism redux - Saadia Toor - 1 views

  • In the 19th and early 20th century, the civilising mission through which colonialism was justified was supported by western feminists who spoke in the name of a ‘global sisterhood of women’ and aimed to ‘save’ their brown sisters from the shackles of tradition and barbarity. Today, this imperialist feminism has re-emerged in a new form, but its function remains much the same – to justify war and occupation in the name of ‘women’s rights’ . Unlike before, this imperialist feminist project includes feminists from the ‘Global South’. Take, for example, the case of American feminists, Afghan women and the global war on terror (GWoT).
  • there was one claim that proved instrumental in securing the consent of the liberals (and, to some extent, of the Left) in the US – the need to rescue Afghan women from the Taliban. This justification for the attack on Afghanistan seemed to have been relegated to the dustbin of history in the years of occupation that followed, reviled for what it was, a shameless attempt to use Afghan women as pawns in a new Great Game.  As the United States draws down its troops in Afghanistan, however, we have begun to see this ‘imperialist feminism’ emerge once again from a variety of constituencies both within the United States and internationally
  • how easily liberal (and left-liberal) guilt can be used to authorise terrible deeds
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  • The fact that the meme of the Muslim woman who must be saved from Islam and Muslim men – through the intervention of a benevolent western state – 11 years after the very real plight of Afghan women was cynically deployed to legitimise a global war, and long after the opportunism of this imperialist feminism was decisively exposed, points to a serious and deep investment in the assumptions that animate these claims. These assumptions come out of a palpable dis-ease with Islam within the liberal mainstream and portions of the Left, a result of the long exposure to Orientalist and Islamophobic discourses.
  • secularism is posited as the necessary prerequisite for achieving equal rights for women
  • The less-than-enthusiastic support for the Arab Spring by liberals on the basis of a fear that the Muslim Brotherhood would come to power (thereby implying that the human rights/women’s rights record of the regimes they were replacing was somehow better) illustrates the liberal anxiety regarding democracy when it comes to the Arab/Muslim ‘world’ and hints at the historical relationship between women’s movements and authoritarian regimes in the postcolonial period
  • Even as the United States officially begins to wind down its war in Afghanistan, the GWoT – recently rebranded as the Overseas Contingency Operation by President Obama – is spreading and intensifying across the ‘Muslim world’, and we can expect to hear further calls for the United States and its allies to save Muslim women. At the same time, we are seeing the mainstreaming and institutionalisation of a gendered anti-Muslim racism within the west, which means that we can also expect to see more of the discourse which pits the rights of Muslim men against those of Muslim women.
  • caution against seeing Muslim women as exceptional victims (of their culture/religion/men), and to point out both that there are family resemblances between the violence suffered by women across the world and that there is no singular ‘Muslim woman’s experience’
Ed Webb

"Arabian Street Artists" Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series | Heba Amin - 0 views

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    Love this so much
Ed Webb

Bin Laden's Failure: How Islamists and the U.S. Ended His War With the West - Michael H... - 0 views

  • If Osama bin Laden were still alive today, one year after he was killed in a U.S. raid, he would hardly recognize the world he knew. Nor would he see the supposed "clash of civilizations" that he tried so hard to foment over two decades of violent jihad
  • Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA official who is deemed one of the most astute analysts of jihadism, wrote in The WSJ that it was always unavoidable that "Islamists who braved the wrath of rulers and trenchantly critiqued the moral breakdown of their societies were going to do well in a post secular age. What is poorly understood in the West is how critical fundamentalists are to the moral and political rejuvenation of their countries. As counter intuitive as it seems, they are the key to more democratic, liberal politics in the region."
  • According to Richard Bulliet, a scholar of modern Arab history at Columbia University, the worst blow that the Arab Spring delivered to radical Islamism was a profound lesson in what works and what doesn't. "If people see that assassinating Anwar Sadat changed nothing, but peacefully demonstrating changed everything, then why should anyone support jihadists any more?"
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  • Based on captured computers and documents, we know that bin Laden always wanted an adversary who would give him more allies than he actually had in the Islamic world. He got such an adversary in George W. Bush. We know that al-Qaida's goal on 9/11 was to draw America into a long and draining conflict and to "bleed" and "bankrupt" our country--bin Laden's own words--by pitting us against the broader Islamist world. When Bush invaded Iraq, bin Laden's hopes were realized
Ed Webb

No More Neocon Faux-Cassandra Posturing: American Defense is not "in Decline"... - 0 views

  • Why is the world’s safest, most powerful country its biggest defense spender, more than triple the next spender (China)?
  • as a percentage of GDP defense has been hovering around 4-5% since the end of the Cold War. Nothing big has changed recently, but for an increase in DoD’s budget after 9/11 that is now being scaled back. The USAF is decades ahead of the Chinese and Russians in stealth and UAVs. We’re weaponizing space. We have ten times the number of nuclear warheads the Chinese have. (The Chinese are actually very responsible on MAD, not wildly overbuilding like we did, but no one ever gives them credit for that.) We have 11 carrier groups; China has zero. If you look at the total US national security budget – because a lot of defense-related spending in the US is done outside of DoD as a gimmick to make the DoD number look smaller than it really should be – it’s actually closer to 8% of GDP: DoD + VA + DHS + the intel community + DoE (which pays for US nukes) = $1T per annum. If Chalmers Johnson is right, we have bases of one kind or another in something like 2/3 of the world’s countries. If anything we look like an imperium, like the Delian League morphing into the Athenian Empire. But one Obama official says ‘leading from behind’ and we don’t charge into Syria – despite charging into Libya and Obama’s first term surge into Afghanistan – and suddenly it’s national security crisis. Good grief, think-tankers. Don’t be so lazy.
  • the blissful unwillingness to learn even the most obvious lessons from the GWoT: that the US – yes, even America – can’t do occupations well
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  • I just can’t read this stuff anymore. It’s so Washington, imperial, macho and childish simultaneously, Americanist, hackneyed, blind to the limits of military power, vain US exceptionalist strutting, and so on. I think there must be a neocon op-ed recycling machine that just manufactures this boilerplate by recombining words like freedom, credibility, American power, strength, willpower, Obama the weakling, and so on
  • I deeply resent this neocon equation of restraint and a little more post-Iraq reticence with isolationism, betraying freedom, selling out Israel and our allies, a return to a pre-9/11 mindset, a return the 30s, Munich, etc. etc. If it makes me an ‘isolationist’ to say we shouldn’t be drone-striking US citizens in obvious violation of the 5th Amendment due process requirements, then I guess I am. If that’s the attitude, then we can never cut defense, ever, and Asians, Muslims and so many others are right – we are an empire. There must alternatives to this; there must be limits and exits. Otherwise we are Rome.
  • We’re intoxicated on our power, bewitched by the awesomeness of our military might. That’s why US military-themed action movies like the Transformers or Battleship, and games like Call of Duty, are so popular. That’s why Fox invokes ‘the troops’ endlessly. That’s why USAF airshows are so popular. That’s why we keep thinking we can fix the Middle East when we can’t
  • high on analogies peddled by right-wing historians like Paul Johnson and Niall Ferguson that we are the new Rome
  • this, then, is why allies free-ride on us. We’d rather infantilize them and complain that they don’t pay, then actually cede power if they had real independent capabilities. So is it surprising that they free-ride?
  • I believe in American power; so do you probably. I am glad the US won the titanic ideological struggles of the 20th century; I don’t want China to dominate Asia; I am as happy as anyone that al Qaeda is struggling, and so on. But American power ≠ American militarism
Ed Webb

Blaming Islam for ISIS: A convenient lie to prepare us for more war | Middle East Eye - 0 views

  • We can’t defeat ISIS if we misrepresent what and who ISIS actually is. Far from being the apocalyptic Islamist group that Wood contends they are, actual IS documents and blue prints reveal IS to be methodical state builders, led by secular Baathists – who aim to restore Sunni-Baathist power in Iraq. These documents also make clear that Saddam’s former generals (anti-Islamists) use Islam as a recruitment tool. “They [ISIS founders] reasoned that Baghdadi, an educated cleric, would give the group a religious face,” notes the German newspaper Der Spiegel.
  • recruits are drawn to ISIS for reasons that have little to do with extremist Islam. “They are woefully ignorant about Islam and have difficulty answering questions about Sharia law, militant jihad, and the Caliphate,”
  • the media welcomes only those who blame Islam or “radical Islam” and not those who speak to the conditions that make ISIS appealing
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  • blaming Islam makes us feel good about ourselves. Blaming Islam is good for television ratings. Blaming Islam makes it easier to sell new wars
Ed Webb

The Pulitzer Problem | Rafia Zakaria - 0 views

  • Taub’s article was published in 2019, slightly more than four years after Salahi himself published his best-selling Guantánamo Diary, which notably did not win a Pulitzer Prize. Large parts of “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret”—awarded a Pulitzer this week in the Feature Writing category—particularly those that deal with Salahi, rehash with the customary “he wrote” what had already been written. Yet while the content may be mostly the same, the purpose is different. Taub, unlike Salahi, is out to deliver absolution to his American reader: casting Steve Wood as an integral player is one part of this; leaving the still-constrained reality of Salahi’s present (he cannot leave tiny Mauritania) to the very end of the piece is another.
  • Credibility and journalistic heroism, as each year’s prizes show, reside in the pages of prestige publications; the New York Times and the Washington Post are mainstays, and since the prizes were first opened up to include magazines in 2015, The New Yorker is as well. No truth is really a truth, particularly a courageous truth, until it appears in their pages. The brown man, the accused terrorist, the actual torture survivor Mohamedou Ould Salahi may have written a great book. But the definitive story about “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret” is the one penned by Taub.
  • Such hefty institutional backing has a relationship to truth-telling and to truth creation. It doesn’t matter that Taub, per his own admission, did not speak Arabic, that he seems to have rehashed a large chunk of his Pulitzer-winning article from an already published book, or even that he spent only a week in Mauritania where Salahi now lives. His article legitimizes a process through which the Western liberal frame is conflated with the lack of any frame at all and applied to foreign places or people through the roving foreign correspondent. Ben Taub is not the problem, of course. It’s just that the edifices of elite journalism consistently elevate the voices of those like him. In a story about how a system of silencing allowed the most shameful cruelties to happen, considering the architecture of truth and silence seems important.
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  • Salahi and countless non-Western others have long known and written about torture at Guantánamo or Bagram or any of the many places where it occurred. But it only becomes a literary, notable, and prize-worthy truth when it flows from the pen of a foreign correspondent at a prestige publication like The New Yorker.
  • “If you say that you are angry,” Salahi tells the two white men, “it is understood as an emotion. If I say that I am angry, it is seen as a threat to national security.”
  • Salahi’s words underscore the truth Taub has not told: that writing an article about torture that does nothing to disrupt a worldview that has left brown men forever suspect is not getting anywhere at all.
Ed Webb

Xinjiang Denialists Are Only Aiding Imperialism | The Nation - 0 views

  • pundits claim that efforts to expose human rights abuses in Xinjiang are really aimed at generating consensus for a “new Cold War” against China. It is only the latest manifestation of American denialism, and instead of challenging US empire, it only helps to cover up US government complicity in the oppression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang
  • anti-imperialists on the left who, in order to critique American empire, dismiss obvious truths and question whether well-documented massacres ever happened. Most notorious among anti-imperialist deniers are Edward S. Herman and David Peterson. In their book The Politics of Genocide, they argue that most accusations of genocide are justifications of US imperialism in the name of “humanitarian intervention.”
  • For many anti-imperialists, the need to denounce US empire is reason enough to support any of its opponents. And if those opponents commit atrocities, their abuses can be denied. Xinjiang is just the latest iteration in this pattern. The specific identities of the Xinjiang denialists don’t really matter, and I have no intention of inflating their cause by naming them or linking to their work. What brings them together is a tireless effort to debunk every aspect of the “mainstream” narrative about Xinjiang
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  • Like the United States itself, China is an imperial state. Its contemporary borders are the result of conquest, and its current population is a collection of peoples violently confined by the forces of the state. Whether you think China is socialist or capitalist doesn’t change this
  • The territory now known as Xinjiang (literally, “new frontier”) was invaded in the mid-18th century amid a global spree of imperial expansions. It was retained by the People’s Republic of China because of a loophole in the decolonization process that enabled states to hold on to colonial possessions that were part of the same landmass. Because China didn’t cross an ocean to colonize Xinjiang, the territory and its people were ineligible for decolonization within the UN’s framework
  • If these people want to criticize America, they can highlight US complicity in ongoing colonialism in Xinjiang. One doesn’t need to invent conspiracies. For example, China’s designation of all forms of Uyghur resistance as terrorism has been directly inspired and enabled by the US-led Global War on Terror.
  • in presenting these facts as evidence of benign governance in Xinjiang, rather than the shallow tokenism of colonial rule, they exemplify a hallmark of what Richard Hofstadter once called the paranoid style in American politics. These denialists do not lack “verifiable facts,” just “sensible judgment.”
  • The US War on Terror made it easier for the Chinese Communist Party to redefine Uyghur resistance as terrorist extremism, rather than national liberation or anti-colonialism.
  • he founder of US mercenary corporation Blackwater, Erik Prince (also brother of former US secretary of education Betsy DeVos) transferred his expertise from Iraq to China via the security service provider Frontier Services Group, which trained anti-terrorism personnel in Beijing and planned to open a “training center” in Xinjiang. And despite Blackwater’s claim that it is pulling out of the region, a 2020 financial report sets aside nearly $2.7 million for “setting up business” in Xinjiang. We also know that US tech companies have helped create a surveillance state in Xinjiang. Companies like Thermo Fisher Scientific and Promega have sold equipment to help police in Xinjiang build a system of racial profiling, based on DNA samples obtained, in part, from a prominent US geneticist. And finally, we know that the supply chains of dozens of US companies run through Xinjiang. Companies like Nike and Apple even lobbied against legislation that would affect their capacity to do business in Xinjiang.
  • Whether you think these complicities support genocide, “mere” atrocities, or “only” colonialism doesn’t change the fact that the US security state has inspired, aided, and profited from the domination over Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.
  • it’s perfectly possible to oppose US empire without engaging in denialism, praising colonialism, and debasing the dignity of victims and survivors
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